Books from Hungary

Lily Ebert grew up in a Jewish family in Hungary. In 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz, where her mother and two youngest siblings were killed on arrival. Still a teenager, she resolved to protect her two remaining sisters and to survive so she could one day bear witness. The memoir recounts her childhood before the war, the conditions inside the camp, and the small acts of defiance that helped her endure.

After liberation, Lily gradually rebuilt her life, eventually settling in London and raising a family. Decades later, at ninety-eight, she co-wrote this book with her great-grandson Dov Forman, who also helped her reach a wide audience through TikTok. The result is an intergenerational account that pairs Lily's firsthand testimony with a younger perspective on why that testimony still matters.

The book traces a path from prewar Hungary through the camp and into the long aftermath of survival. Lily's promise, made to herself on Yom Kippur 1944, was to tell the world what happened on behalf of those who could not. This memoir is the fulfillment of that commitment.

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Budai, a linguist heading to a professional conference in Helsinki, somehow ends up in an unknown city. Nothing about the place is familiar. The signs, announcements, and conversations around him are in languages he cannot identify, and no one he meets can understand him either. The city is enormously crowded, its streets and buildings packed with people speaking what seems like an endless variety of tongues. Budai has no way to ask for help, buy food reliably, or find out where he is.

Each day in the city repeats the same desperate pattern. Budai tries to communicate, fails, and retreats to his hotel, where his only point of human contact is the woman who operates the elevator. Their connection develops without a shared language, built on gestures and proximity. Meanwhile, he worries that his wife back home believes he is dead. The metropolis itself feels sealed off, offering no visible exit and no clue about its location on a map.

Ferenc Karinthy, a Hungarian novelist and the son of the well-known satirist Frigyes Karinthy, wrote Metropole as a novel about isolation pressed into the shape of a city. The book strips away every tool its protagonist relies on as a linguist and places him in a setting where expertise in language counts for nothing.

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Satantango is set in a small, nearly abandoned hamlet on the Hungarian plain. Over a handful of rain-soaked days, about a dozen remaining residents drift through schemes, betrayals, infidelity, and collapsing hopes. Into this stagnant place arrives a figure who seems to offer a way out, a messianic promise that pulls the villagers toward him.

The novel's structure mirrors the tango of its title. Its chapters move forward and then double back, revisiting the same events from different angles so that the reader gradually assembles a fuller picture of what is happening and why. László Krasznahorkai writes in long, winding sentences that carry the narrative forward without conventional breaks, creating a dense, unrelenting rhythm. The Hungarian author published the book in 1985, and it later became the basis for Béla Tarr's seven-hour film adaptation.

George Szirtes translated the novel into English, keeping the sustained, looping sentence style that defines Krasznahorkai's prose. The atmosphere of slow decay and uneasy expectation runs through the book, along with themes of collective credulity, the appeal of a promised rescue, and the difficulty of leaving a place that has already failed.

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Set in the autumn of 1899, Skylark follows an elderly Hungarian couple, the Vajkays, through one unusual week. They live in Sárszeg, a provincial town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father spends his days on genealogical research and heraldry. Mother keeps house. Their unmarried daughter, nicknamed Skylark, cooks and sews for them and anchors their quiet life. When Skylark leaves for a rare visit to relatives in the country, the couple is alone.

At first the Vajkays are lost without her. Gradually they return to the social life of the town they had withdrawn from: dinners, theater, conversation with neighbors. Pleasures they had set aside resurface across the week, and with them feelings that are harder to admit. Kosztolányi uses the daughter's absence to expose what the parents have hidden from themselves about their attachment and its cost.

Dezső Kosztolányi published the novel in 1924, drawing on the provincial Hungary he knew from childhood. It is regarded as a central work of twentieth-century Hungarian fiction, built on controlled irony and close observation of small-town society at the turn of the century. The action covers a single week and stays within one household's ordinary hours.

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Magda Szabo's The Door, published in Hungarian as Az Ajto in 1987, follows a writer named Magda who hires a housekeeper, Emerence, on a friend's recommendation. Their connection develops over roughly twenty years in twentieth-century Hungary. Emerence is dependable and tireless in her work, yet stubborn, coarse in speech, and openly dismissive of her employer's opinions. She lets nobody past her own front door.

Emerence covers her face with a veil and says almost nothing about her earlier life, which leaves her both feared and admired by the people around her. Magda, absorbed in writing and public life, gradually begins to press for answers. A dog the two women take in becomes part of what holds them together, and their arguments carry genuine humor alongside the friction.

The novel sets one kind of force, literary and verbal, against another that is physical and practical. Around the household, the history of twentieth-century Hungary keeps pressing in, and the rooms Emerence guards hold matters she has never explained to anyone. Szabo builds the book around trust, privacy, and how much one person can ever know of another.

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Ferenc Molnar published The Paul Street Boys in 1906. Set in Budapest, the novel follows a group of schoolboys who claim a vacant lot, known as the grund, as their territory for games and meetings. A rival gang called the Redshirts wants to take the lot for themselves, and the story builds around the escalating conflict between the two groups. The boys organize with military-style ranks and codes of honor, treating their dispute over a patch of urban ground with complete seriousness.

Among the Paul Street boys, Nemecsek stands out as the only one holding the rank of private. His loyalty to the group and his determination to prove himself drive much of the novel's emotional weight. Molnar, as his grandson Mátyás Sárközi notes in a later preface, was influenced by the popularity of James Fenimore Cooper's frontier stories in Hungary at the time. The comparison to Mark Twain is also relevant: Molnar balances humor and absurdity against genuine feeling without tipping into sentimentality.

The novel explores how children construct hierarchies, enforce loyalty, and assign meaning to places that adults consider unremarkable. Its Budapest setting grounds the action in a specific neighborhood, giving the boys' struggle a concrete geography rather than an abstract backdrop.

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The Traditional Hungarian Kitchen by Ilona Horvath is a cookbook containing 133 recipes drawn from widely used Hungarian home cooking. The collection covers both everyday meals and dishes prepared for holidays and celebrations, offering a practical cross-section of the country's food traditions. Recipes are presented as accessible and straightforward, aimed at cooks who want to reproduce Hungarian dishes without specialist equipment or hard-to-find ingredients.

Hungarian cuisine relies on a handful of distinctive elements. Paprika, both sweet and hot, appears across soups, stews, and sauces. Sour cream is used to finish many dishes, and lard has historically served as the primary cooking fat. Familiar preparations such as gulyás, a beef and onion soup seasoned with paprika, and chicken paprikás with sour cream sauce represent a cooking style built around slow-simmered meats and generous seasoning. Noodles, dumplings, and filled pastries round out many meals.

Horvath's book organizes these traditions into a single volume sized for regular kitchen use. By grouping recipes for both daily and festive cooking, it reflects the way Hungarian households have long treated certain dishes as ordinary fare and others as markers of specific occasions or seasons.

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The Tragedy of Man is a dramatic work by Hungarian author Imre Madách, first published in 1861. Written in fifteen scenes, the play follows three recurring figures, Adam, Eve, and Lucifer, through a sweeping arc that begins with creation and ends in a distant frozen future. Between those poles, the characters reappear across ten historical periods, each time wearing different identities. Adam appears as a Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, as the Athenian general Miltiades, as the astronomer Johannes Kepler in Prague, and as Georges Danton during the French Revolution, among other roles. Eve and Lucifer shift alongside him, sometimes as allies, sometimes as adversaries.

The settings move from Eden to Egypt, Athens, Rome, Constantinople during the First Crusade, and onward through London in the nineteenth century and into imagined futures. One scene places Adam and Lucifer inside a rigid collectivist society where they pose as traveling chemists. Another sends them into space. The final historical scene depicts an ice age thousands of years ahead, before the play circles back to its starting point outside Eden.

Many lines from the work have entered everyday speech in Hungary, and it remains one of the most frequently staged Hungarian plays. A 1984 live-action film and a 2011 animated adaptation have both drawn on its structure and themes.

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They Were Counted is the opening volume of Miklós Bánffy's Transylvanian Trilogy, set during the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The novel follows two upper-class Hungarian cousins whose lives run in opposite directions. Count Bálint Abády is a liberal-minded politician who takes a serious interest in the conditions of Romanian peasants living on Transylvanian estates. His cousin László moves through a cycle of parties, hunts, gambling, and social display, largely indifferent to the political tensions building around him.

Bánffy, himself a Transylvanian aristocrat, writes from close knowledge of the world he depicts. The society in his novel is lavish and self-absorbed, its members occupied with love affairs, duels, and political maneuvering while the structures holding their empire together weaken. Transylvania's landscape, with its forests and mountain ridges, forms a persistent backdrop to the social drama.

The novel is the first of three. The subsequent volumes, They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided, continue the story through the years leading up to the First World War. Bánffy's trilogy has drawn comparisons to the work of Joseph Roth and Marcel Proust for its attention to a vanishing aristocratic order and the slow arrival of historical change.

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